You don’t need to be a genius to realize San Diego has produced some extraordinary artistic talents over the years. But it’s always nice to get official recognition, especially when such recognition comes once a decade at best.

Between 1981 — when it began honoring singular talents in virtually every creative field — and 2011, the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation has awarded its much-coveted annual
MacArthur Fellowship
to as many as two dozen recipients each year. But of the 700-plus honorees in that 30-year period, only one San Diego musician — composer and now-former UC San Diego professor George Lewis — was selected for the so-called “genius grant” (and that was back in 2002).

On Oct. 2, the long drought finally came to an end. Among this year’s 23 honorees, which include a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a Yale University computer scientist, the MacArthur Foundation selected a pair of San Diego-bred music innovators.

So, let’s again applaud San Diego natives
Claire Chase
(a cutting-edge flutist, arts curator, entrepreneur and the founder of the International Contemporary Ensemble) and
Chris Thile
(the genre-leaping mandolin master, songwriter, singer and former Nickel Creek member who now leads the group Punch Brothers). As MacArthur recipients, he and Chase will each be given $500,000 over the next five years, to use any way they like in their creative pursuits.

Chase, 34, and multi-Grammy Award winner Thile, 31, are now both New York residents. Both have been earning national accolades for well over a decade and both are at the forefront of their respective fields.

MacArthur chose Chase in recognition of her “forging a new model for the commissioning, recording, and live performance of contemporary classical music. ... As an entrepreneur, curator, educator, and musician, Chase is engaging audiences in the appreciation of contemporary classical music and opening new avenues of artistic expression for the 21st-century musician.”

Thile’s qualifications as a MacArthur recipient are no less impressive: “Through his adventurous, multifaceted artistry as both a composer and performer with various ensembles, Thile is creating a distinctly American canon for the mandolin and a new musical aesthetic for performers and audiences alike.”

Might these two visionary artists from San Diego collaborate, if only to learn what two musical geniuses might do together that they can’t do on their own?

“Amazingly, Chris and I never met or crossed paths in our hometown then or now!” Chase said last week. “But we should do something about that. I’m a huge fan of his playing and writing.”

The band, whose debut album came out in 1975, is led by singer and San Diego native Ann Wilson. She and her younger sister, Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson, spent several years growing up at Camp Pendleton, where their dad was stationed as an officer in the Marines. The sisters’ musical epiphany came in 1964 at their grandmother’s house in La Jolla, where they watched The Beatles’ U.S. television debut.

Years in the making, “I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story” recounts the sometimes harrowing relationship between the famed troubadour, who died in a 1973 plane crash, and his wife, pioneering San Diego restaurateur Ingrid Croce.

Co-written with her second husband, Jimmy Rock, it’s a warts-and-all portrait of Jim Croce, who — Ingrid writes — had numerous affairs and reacted to Ingrid’s 1967 rape by slapping her and becoming emotionally detached for much of the time until his death. “I don’t know that I ever will stop loving Jim Croce,” Ingrid said in a 2012 U-T San Diego interview, “and it’s wonderful that Jimmy (Rock) recognizes that.”

La Mesa native Dave Mustaine is best known as the leader of the band Megadeth and as a former member of Metallica. Earlier this year, he became the only heavy-metal musician of note to voice his support for GOP candidate Rick Santorum’s presidential bid.

But Mustaine, a San Diego County resident, insisted he was not officially endorsing Santorum. How much his support might have helped is unknown, since Santorum soon quit the race. Mustaine did not throw his support to another candidate, in contrast with Bruce Spingsteen (who again hit the road in support of President Obama) and Kid Rock (who backed Mitt Romney).